un-homely, namely, that unhomely that is the fundamental trait of human abode in the midst of beings.
b) The open
What is characteristic of human abode is grounded in the fact that being in general has opened itself to humans and is this very open. As such an open. it receives human beings for itself, and so determines them to be in a site. We here speak of the open with regard to what is said in the word and concept ἀλήθεια, unconcealment of beings. when correctly understood. As unconcealed, beings are in the open. The open, in accordance with its essential conception, has an unequivocal and singular content and relation to what was experienced at the commencement of Western thought yet at once became lost as a fundamental experience. To "see" the open, thus understood, is the distinction of human beings. The animal is animal precisely on account of its not seeing the open, as understood in this way, which is also why it is unable to say the "is" or being, that is. is altogether unable to say. The animal is ἄλογον—without the word.2
The uncanniness of human beings has its essence in unhomeliness, which, however, is what it is only through human beings in general being homely in being, that is, not only "seeing the open," but in seeing it, also standing within it.
Thus understood, the uncanniness of human beings that is rooted in un-homeliness is named poetically in the choral ode by the word δεινόν but is not thoughtfully unfolded. Because, even within this poetic telling. the unhomely essence of uncanniness comes to light only by way of intimation. and yet decisively. uncanniness thus conceived remains closed off in the realm of what is scarcely sayable throughout all subsequent determinations of human beings in the Western tradition. And because, ever since modernity. being in general and the human being. as well as the relation between them. are thought of as "consciousness" and in terms of "self-consciousness," everything that cannot be accounted for within the realm of consciousness is placed in the sphere of the unconscious—a sphere first posited in terms of consciousness—the sphere of whatever is Inaccessible to consciousness (ratio). What Rilke calls the open goes back to this fateful, modern, and metaphysical concept of the "unconscious."
2. Although Rilke"s eighth Duino elegy begins: "With all its eyes, the creature sees the open," should be clear after what has been said that if our concept of the open, which points toward ἀλήθεια, can be compared at all with Rilke's word, then at most it thinks the complete opposite. The grounds for this profoundly untrue word of Rilke's are the same as those that sustain Nietzsche's metaphysics, grounds that we may designate imprecisely and by way of a catchword as unsurmounted biologism. This by way of an aside, because the thoughtless lumping together of my thinking with Rilke's poetry has already become a cliché.